The present invention relates broadly to an industrial air cleaner unit and in particular to a self-cleaning air cleaner unit designed as a compact relatively small package that can be easily moved from one work area to another as desired.
The prior art, including units manufactured by the assignee of the present invention, comprised units designed for the same general application as the present invention but which generally incorporated cloth bags as filters and were provided with means to manually agitate the bags when cleaning of the filters was needed. Additionally, in the prior art units the filters have been vertically mounted thereby substantially increasing the overall height of the units. The prior art units required frequent operator servicing to clean the unit filters and additionally were somewhat unwieldy and difficult to reposition to various work stations.
It is desirable to have a compact relatively small package unit that can be easily moved around a manufacturing plant by a single person and which has a self-cleaning feature to minimize servicing of the unit.
The present invention therefore includes a housing structure to provide a compact portable unit. A partition divides the interior of the housing into a substantially horizontally elongated filtering chamber and a substantially vertically elongated clean air chamber. The positioning of a dust-laden air inlet and a clean air outlet on the housing generates an air flow through the housing which facilitates the self-cleaning of the filter units. In the preferred embodiment of the invention, the filter elements utilized are conventional prior art pleated paper filters and reverse cleaning air pulse apparatus is disposed within the housing.
The present invention thus is an air cleaner having a compact housing and which incorporates the advantages of self-cleaning.